<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Help Me Make It Through the Night by FrenchTwistResistance</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29748396">Help Me Make It Through the Night</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance'>FrenchTwistResistance</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Trek: Voyager</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, But not that angsty of angst more a lot of overthinking, Episode Related, F/F, Quite a bit of bad language</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 22:20:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,601</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29748396</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Kathryn Janeway and B’Elanna Torres seek each other out after significant events. They like to not talk to each other.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kathryn Janeway/B'Elanna Torres</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>43</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Episode: 2.24 Tuvix</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s not as if Kathryn hadn’t liked Tuvix. </p><p>She had. </p><p>If he’d been his own person, his own independent entity, and she had met him in a vacuum, some alternate universe where Tuvok and Neelix as separate people had never existed, she would’ve liked him a lot, actually.</p><p>Ideally, the whole thing would’ve happened during the spatial scission; then with all the duplicates, maybe all three of them could’ve lived if they’d all played their cards right.</p><p>That’s stupid, though. Nobody would’ve been out picking orchids during a Vidiian attack.</p><p>So. As it stands.</p><p>As it stands, none of that is the current circumstance, and she’d made the best call for the needs of the many rather than the needs of the few. That’s something both Neelix and Tuvok can appreciate individually, right?</p><p>She still feels pretty fucking crummy about it all, regardless.</p><p>As a teenager, her dog had mortally injured a rabbit once, and because she’d been irresponsible with the dog, her father had made her put the rabbit out of its misery herself. It had been horrible. That dying rabbit sound haunts her sometimes to this day.</p><p>She’d half expected Tuvix to make the same noise. That’s stupid, though.</p><p>She gets a fresh drink and goes to change out the record. She oughtn’t be listening to such maudlin garbage. She can feel herself slipping into depression, and she shouldn’t wet down the slide. Maybe she ought to just get rid of Edith Piaf. That romantic French fucker always gets her down, and she doesn't need that energy. </p><p>She puts on some Romulan marches instead. Upbeat and nutty. Exactly the mood music to zone out playing solitaire.</p><p>Everyone had told her it had been stupid to take her record player on a short-term mission chasing a Maquis ship through the Badlands. They’d all said it was sentimental hogwash to lug that ancient contraption anywhere, let alone her state-of-the-art starship. “Just because Justin refurbished it for you doesn’t mean that you need to carry it around with you everywhere,” had been the typical refrain. </p><p>“You could leave it in my attic for safe keeping,” Mark had said, and there probably hadn’t been any jealousy and judgement in the suggestion. It had probably been meant as thoughtful and accommodating. But she hadn’t taken it that way, of course. She had taken it as hiding it away and forgetting about it. </p><p>Only her sister had been on her side about it, and even that support had been tepid. Phoebe had said,</p><p>“I get it. Sometimes you need the pops and cracks of a vinyl to remind you that you’re a real person. But Katie. Don’t you think it’s kind of jinxing yourself? Why should you need something to remind you you’re a real person if you’re going to be back in a couple of weeks?”</p><p>She’d been able to volley all the other criticisms, but she hadn’t had a good answer to that.</p><p>Maybe Phoebe had been right. Maybe she had jinxed herself. Maybe her record player is a cursed object. She’d be more likely to believe this superstitious bullshit if she didn’t feel such a peace wash over her when she sets the needle down in a groove, hears the scratch take hold and vibrate into productive sound. </p><p>Everyone had told her it had been stupid to take her record player, and yet here it is one of her only true pleasures in the Delta Quadrant. </p><p>And that’s a whole guilty thing in itself. </p><p>Through her own sappiness or maybe subconscious self-sabotage if Phoebe had been right, she’s got this dumb thing that gives her a lot of comfort. Harry’d had to save up replicator rations for months to get himself a clarinet. </p><p>What analogous structures does anybody else have? Chakotay’s healing wheel? Doesn’t count. He’d known when he’d started that he’d be on the Val Jean for the long haul—not this long of a haul, granted—and anyway religious people always take their religious accouterments with them. A rosary in their pocket whether they’re going to pick up the kids from daycare or they’re going to serve a six-month tour on Deep Space Nine. </p><p>Is the record player a religious talisman to her, then?</p><p>Just another thing not to dwell on. Pack that up with Edith Piaf and throw the whole box out an airlock.</p><p>Although.</p><p>Best not to get rid of ol’ Edith too hastily. When she’s not already in a mood, Edith can be good sexy music. All that smoky chiaroscuro Gallic yearning.</p><p>She laughs out loud. </p><p>When would she need sexy music? </p><p>She’s already decided she can’t let herself get involved with any crew members. Not so much because of regulation—Starfleet would understand the situation and give her the go-ahead, certainly—but for morale. She’s already got a record player that nobody else had had the foresight to bring along just in case. She doesn’t need to add insult to injury by picking one of them over the others and waving it in all their faces that yeah, she got them all into this shitty predicament but at least she’s getting her needs met. How tone deaf and selfish.</p><p>However. </p><p>Maybe they’ll pick up some hot strays at some point. That could go over better.</p><p>There’d been Amelia Earhart, of course. So there’s hope, she supposes. </p><p>Hadn’t been a lot of music involved in that, though. And completely hush-hush, too.</p><p>She laughs out loud again as she thinks about telling her sixteen-year-old self about that one:</p><p>“Well, Katie. Good news and bad news. You know how you sometimes touch yourself in the bath fantasizing about being a 1930s aviatrix who rescues Amelia Earhart and then you two get naked and kiss a lot…? Well! It’s better than you imagined!”</p><p>“That sounds insane already. But go on. What’s the bad news, Future Me?”</p><p>“Better sit down, kid. Quite a lot of bad news.”</p><p>Geez, this Quadrant is really just going to do all it can to drive her mad, isn’t it? That’s stupid, though.</p><p>It’s not as though it’s some conspiracy against just her. The longer they’re out here, the more she thinks the whole Quadrant is all an elaborate set of funhouse mirrors and therefore drives just about anybody mad. </p><p>Have they met anybody out here who isn’t some brand of crazy? </p><p>Maybe that’s xenophobic. Maybe everybody’s crazy in their own way, and she’s just not used to this particular crazy quite yet. She’s got sixty years yet. She’s sure she’ll adapt.</p><p>The Romulan marches and solitaire (and bourbon) aren’t working. She’s still just as wound up thinking about stuff as she had been an hour ago.</p><p>New parameters. Cheesy 1950s pop standards duets and a crossword puzzle. That’s usually a pretty effective combo for getting her mind right. She hasn’t had enough bourbon yet that her penmanship has been compromised, so she’d better take the opportunity while she still can.</p><p>One across. Six letters. A fourth state of matter.</p><p>She laughs out loud once more. </p><p>Just the four? Tell that to the Delta Quadrant.</p><p>She prints P-L-A-S-M-A in neat capital letters, and the door chimes.</p><p>She looks at the chronometer. It’s 2320, and Chakotay’s on Gamma, and she’d already spoken to Kes. Nobody else had even looked in her direction all day following the Tuvix “murder,” so she’s at a loss at who this could be.</p><p>Maybe it’s Tuvok, here to thank her in his restrained Vulcan way. Or maybe it’s Neelix, here to thank her in his effusive Talaxian way. She doesn’t particularly want to see either of them. </p><p>Sure. She’d be glad to know they’re both alive and well and appreciate her decision, but she knows she’s had just enough to drink that she wouldn’t be able to look at either of them without getting a little teary-eyed remembering what she’d done to liberate them.</p><p>She gulps back the rest of her bourbon and then stands, crosses to the replicator for another. She sighs deeply, steels herself, says,</p><p>“Come in.”</p><p>The door swishes open, and her shoulders relax slightly.</p><p>If B’Elanna Torres is here at this time of night, it’s statistically probably about some concrete and beautifully distracting engineering quandary rather than any of the horseshit she’s been riling herself up about.</p><p>“Hello, Lieutenant,” she says. </p><p>“Hi, Captain,” Torres says.</p><p>There’s a long pause as Torres stands just inside the room with her hands in the pockets of her tight jeans, her traps visibly tense under the worn cotton of her cut-off t-shirt.</p><p>She watches Torres rake her eyes over her pink-satin-nightie covered body. She watches Torres swallow. </p><p>It’s probably a completely normal reaction to seeing a superior officer off-duty in her pajamas. She’d seen Admiral Paris once in an undershirt and boxer shorts. She’d been similarly rendered mute.</p><p>However, on that occasion, she’d focused on his eyes and had willed herself into speaking.</p><p>She had certainly not looked him up and down very slowly, cataloguing each muscle and sinew of his body on display under thin fabric. Which. She can’t be one hundred percent sure that that’s what Torres had just done. It did very much appear that way, though.</p><p>She’s not particularly vain, but she must admit that she’s objectively an attractive woman. An attractive woman in a form-fitting nightgown. That’s got to be jarring for anybody expecting a boxy uniform. So she doesn’t give Torres’s perusal much thought.</p><p>She also doesn’t give much thought to how she’d felt herself heat up under such scrutiny. </p><p>Because surely Torres is not looking at her like that. </p><p>If she really believes that last part:</p><p>Then it logically follows that Torres had not looked at her in the exact same way when she’d come around to discuss her feelings after the incidents with the Vidiians and the Fear Clown and the Mokra and the Botha, either.</p><p>Those had all been pajamas meetings, as well. Surely Torres is used to her in pajamas by now. </p><p>Or perhaps she times these meetings specifically— </p><p>Nope, shut that down. Put that in the box with Edith.</p><p>Oh shit. No matter what’s in the box or what’s not in the box or whether the cat is dead or alive, the facts are stacking up: Torres isn’t in uniform, she’s looking at her like that, and something emotional and ridiculous had happened today. That means this is probably not a quantum mechanics talk.</p><p>She leans against the replicator, says,</p><p>“What can I do for you, B’Elanna?”</p><p>“You don’t need to do anything for me,” Torres says.</p><p>“What a load off,” she says. “Drink?”</p><p>“No, thanks.” She probably ought to quit for the evening, too. No use wasting a fresh drink, though.</p><p>“Please, have a seat.”</p><p>They both sit. Not at opposite ends but not right next to each other, either. Kathryn’s got her legs tucked under her and an arm slung over the back of the couch. Torres crosses her legs at the knee, and she watches. Her jeans are very tight indeed, and the girl’s got some quadriceps on her.</p><p>At least Edith won’t be too lonely in her box. And if she remembers her sapphic rumors of the twentieth century correctly, Edith will appreciate the idea of those legs.</p><p>“Well?” Kathryn says.</p><p>“You probably don’t want to talk about it. And neither do I, really. Just wanted to tell you I think you did the right thing. And you probably ought to get me set up with a work station on the Bridge,” Torres says.</p><p>She cocks her head and studies Torres’s face. Torres has her jaw set and her ridges furrowed slightly. It’s her serious and halfway angry face.</p><p>“You’re right. I don’t want to talk about it. And thank you for your support. But. You hate working on the Bridge. The last time I made you do that, you complained about how little got done in Engineering for a whole week afterward.”</p><p>“I know. But you’re always on my dick about being a team player,” Torres says. Kathryn laughs. Torres doesn’t usually bring out her more colorful turns of phrase until after a little alcohol. Maybe she’d already had a few before she’d arrived.</p><p>“Not how I would describe my mentoring process.” She pauses, and Torres laughs. “But what’s that got to do with your working on the Bridge?” Torres is serious again, more serious than before:</p><p>“I heard about the big scene, and it seems to me you need somebody up there you can trust to deck malcontents. All those regular Bridge officer bozos really let that Frankenstein say all that horrendous shit to you without knocking his lights out.”</p><p>They look at each other. Kathryn almost laughs: Hadn’t Torres herself been a malcontent saying horrendous shit to her not that long ago? But still, it’s a nice sentiment. Kathryn says,</p><p>“Tensions were high. A physical altercation wouldn’t have solved anything. A certain degree of empathy and diplomacy was required.”</p><p>“Maybe, but punching that motherless jerk would have been pretty satisfying to me, personally.”</p><p>“And why is that, B’Elanna?” Torres shrugs and then grins, says,</p><p>“Haven’t punched anybody in a while. I figured I could get a free pass if it was defending your honor.” Kathryn laughs, swats her lightly on the shoulder—her bare, warm, smooth, toned shoulder—says,</p><p>“And what if I’d put you in the brig instead of giving you a free pass?”</p><p>“Wouldn’t be so bad. I’d still have punched somebody who had disrespected you.”</p><p>“Well. You make a compelling argument. But I think you’re more good to me in Engineering.” Torres seems to consider this, her brow scrunched in thought. Then she says,</p><p>“I can accept that. But only because Tuvok’s back. If he’d been there this afternoon, he wouldn’t have let that shit fly for a second.” </p><p>That’s not something Kathryn had allowed herself to consider, but once it’s out of Torres’s mouth, hanging in the air between them, she knows it’s right. An officer openly and publicly defying her, arguing with her, not following direct orders, actively trying to recruit others into his coup, and on top of all that attempting to flee? Tuvok would have allowed exactly zero of those things. Had all that come from Neelix’s side of the family? Surely not.</p><p>“I’m sure Lieutenant Tuvok will be pleased to know you think so highly of him,” Kathryn says. Torres scoffs, says,</p><p>“How, exactly, do you tell if a Vulcan is pleased?”</p><p>“That’s one of the best things about Vulcans. You don’t have to navigate a bunch of ambiguous facial expressions and body language. If they want you to know something, they typically just explicitly tell you.”</p><p>Torres shifts closer to her on the divan, says,</p><p>“Is that your preference, then, Kathryn? You like explicit declarations?”</p><p>There’s something in her tone that raises goosebumps on the back of Kathryn’s neck.</p><p>“Depends on the declaration,” Kathryn says.</p><p>“And on the definition of explicit, no doubt,” Torres says.</p><p>“No doubt,” Kathryn says. </p><p>Torres drags a fingertip along Kathryn’s forearm a few centimeters and then retracts it, laughs, says,</p><p>“So if Tuvok were to say, ‘Fuck yeah, I’m pleased,’ would that be ideal for you? The perfect combination of explicit and explicit?” Kathryn laughs, says,</p><p>“But that wouldn’t be the perfect combination. I’ve never known him to curse. It’d be out of character.”</p><p>Torres stands and smooths down her shirt, says,</p><p>“If only there were somebody to tell you the truth in the foulest language.” She walks toward the door. “I’ll quit bothering you and let you get to bed, Captain.”</p><p>Edith Piaf and her cohorts might require more than one box.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Episode: 2.25 Resolutions</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s not as if Kathryn doesn’t like Chakotay. </p><p>She does. </p><p>She might even love him in a tentative, familial way. If they’d met at another time and in another place, under different circumstances, perhaps she’d like him and love him more and differently.</p><p>She likes him, and she could probably be attracted to him given the right amount of time and the right circumstances, and she’d certainly been moved by his Angry Warrior parable.</p><p>But somehow, she’d been more captivated by that monkey. </p><p>And that had not been a good sign for any romance that might have been trying to rev up. Like trying to start the cold engine on a feed truck in January when there’s a cat sleeping in the belt.</p><p>That had happened once when she’d been a kid, too. But that one had not been her fault at all, and so she hadn’t had to mess with any half dead cats, mercifully.</p><p>Geez. He’d built her a bathtub. That ought to have been enough. She’d been seduced by far less. Hell, Mark had been on the opposing team for a pick-up basketball game, and all it had taken to fall in love with him was the way he’d teased her about her jump shot. “For a woman with such nice legs, you’ve got lousy ups.”</p><p>Maybe it had been because she hadn’t had her record player to ground her, to remind her that she’s a person.</p><p>All bathtubs and monkeys and no music make Katie a dull girl? That’s stupid, though.</p><p>If they were still quarantined, she wouldn’t have to think about it so much. She’d just adjust gradually and figure it out, rile herself up about other stuff instead—the weather, the ecology, the ethology—tangible stuff for day-to-day living, keeping her brain busy with experiments, and Chakotay would be there being patient and kind.</p><p>But now that they’re back, it all hurts more acutely. He loves her, and she’s ambivalent, and she has to look at him and know both and pretend that she can’t be with him because of principles or whatever because she doesn’t want to hurt him with the truth.</p><p>She’d had the chance to not be The Captain and to be loved and cared for as herself, and she’d pointedly not taken that chance. She wonders if her feelings aren’t exactly genuine—that she’d deliberately sabotaged herself, willed herself into not wanting to play house. Maybe she’s gotten used to being a Captain rather than a person and rather likes it in a way.</p><p>That’s stupid, though.</p><p>She can’t even look at her record player.</p><p>She’d been so reminded of being a different kind of person by talking to her tomato plants that it almost feels like adultery to thumb through LPs searching for a different kind of similar high.</p><p>She remembers setting out on a stroll to reorient herself with the ship, drink in the sounds and smells of it again. She remembers passing the torpedo bay and the mess hall and the warp core. She remembers waving to passing crewmen. She even remembers getting off the turbolift on Deck 9.</p><p>She doesn’t remember ringing Torres’s door chime.</p><p>But there’s Torres in a white ribbed a-shirt and orange cotton panties, a very confused look on her face, a can of beer in one hand, saying,</p><p>“Captain?”</p><p>She tries not to look at the long planes of Torres’s legs, the not very well concealed peaks of her nipples.</p><p>“Were you expecting someone else?” Kathryn says.</p><p>“I wasn’t expecting anyone, in fact.”</p><p>“Mind if I come in?”</p><p>“Of course not,” Torres says. “Make yourself comfortable. Um. Lemme just go put on some pants—”</p><p>Kathryn slumps onto Torres’s couch, says,</p><p>“Don’t bother. You’re allowed to wear what you want in your own quarters. I’m not embarrassed if you’re not.”</p><p>“Ok,” Torres shrugs and finally pops the top on the can of beer she’s been holding, says. “You want one?”</p><p>“Please,” Kathryn says. Torres passes the can to her and retrieves another from her mini fridge. She pops the top and perches atop the mini fridge.</p><p>“So. What’s up, Captain?”</p><p>“Just wanted to look at a different face for a change.”</p><p>“Understandable, I guess. What’d you do? Pick mine out of a hat?” Torres says. Kathryn laughs,</p><p>“Don’t be silly. I cast lots.” Torres laughs.</p><p>“Well, it seems Kahless smiled on me.”</p><p>“Oh? Is that how casting lots works?” Kathryn says.</p><p>“That’s what my mother would have you believe, anyway. Old Testament Jehovah might be involved in some kind of way, though. I don’t really know. Good thing you came here to look at my face and drink beer instead of discuss comparative xenotheology.”</p><p>“I’ll drink to that.”</p><p>Torres sits on the couch now and clinks their cans together.</p><p>They look at each other for a long moment, and then Torres turns away. She says,</p><p>“I can’t shake the feeling that you came here because you want to talk to me about something. Maybe not religion, but something.”</p><p>Does Kathryn want to talk about something? Not really. She suddenly realizes she kind of just wants to get loaded and stare at Torres’s tits. Very little alcohol and very few tits on New Earth. She’d missed both.</p><p>“I think I came here because I don’t want to talk about anything, actually.”</p><p>“And I’m a good person to not talk to?” Torres says with a raised brow but a smile in her voice.</p><p>“Who am I to question the lots that were cast?”</p><p>“Well, of course. But before we start not talking…” Torres’s voice is that same timbre and cadence again that raises goosebumps at her hairline. </p><p>What is Kathryn agreeing to by admitting she’s here to not talk? She’d meant it as not talking about anything deep. Is Torres meaning—</p><p>That’s stupid, though. </p><p>Shut up, Edith. Get back in your box and quit whispering naughty shit into her ear.</p><p>“Before we start not talking, what?” Kathryn says. The annoyance she feels at herself and her prurient thoughts has seeped out into her voice.</p><p>Torres bites her lip at that, looks a bit abashed.</p><p>“Just spit it out, Torres.”</p><p>“A couple of the old Maquis and I took Chakotay to a ‘welcome back’ dinner—” The jealousy—she doesn’t have time to analyze where it comes from or what it actually means—hits her fast and sharp and stupid, and she blurts out sort of petulantly,</p><p>“Nobody took me to a ‘welcome back dinner.’”</p><p>“That’s because I’m on both committees. Yours is tomorrow. And anyway, I figured you’d want a little time to yourself. You ought to be glad I vetoed Neelix’s immediate-ship-wide-party idea.” And that’s plenty to pour ice water on her jealousy. Torres knows her well enough to know she wouldn’t be ready for that kind of company just yet. No wonder she’d ended up here rather than somewhere else. She says,</p><p>“Not only are you on two committees, but you also have veto power? Impressive.”</p><p>“Well yeah. What liar who needs his block knocked off told you I wasn't impressive?”</p><p>“Nobody would say that to my face. They’d know I would knock their block off myself.” Torres gives her a skeptical side eye and then takes her beer can, takes both of their empties to the recycler. She gets two more from the mini fridge and resumes her seat.</p><p>Kathryn reaches for the proffered beer, and just to test it out, just to run a miniature experiment, grazes her fingers over Torres’s during the exchange. It’s nowhere close to a well-designed study as she has a lot of her own biases that she hasn’t parsed yet, and she hadn’t documented her control because she hadn’t known it had been her control at the time (when Chakotay had passed her a salt shaker last week, and their fingers had brushed, and she’d seen his eyes dart away, and she’d wondered if he’d felt some type of way about that accidental caress because she certainly hadn’t). And she hasn’t got but a split second to come up with a hypothesis or any methodology.</p><p>She grazes her fingers over Torres’s, and there’s the flutter in her stomach that she’d hypothesized would be there. But perhaps it wouldn’t be there if this were an unexpected contact. But she’d known from the outset this is a faulty experiment. It might suggest, but it doesn’t strongly suggest, and it certainly doesn’t prove.</p><p>The trial doesn’t end as quickly as she’d anticipated it would, however.</p><p>Torres keeps her hold on the can, makes eye contact. The flutter flutters again but lower, decidedly not in her stomach. She skims more purposefully this time: instead of a general graze, it’s a single fingertip at Torres’s index finger’s first knuckle up to the web and then down to the middle finger’s first knuckle. And then she grips the can, and Torres releases it. Torres breaks eye contact first, to look at her pop tab as she opens her beer.</p><p>Much to analyze from this experiment.</p><p>She’ll get around to it later. For now. She opens her beer, clears her throat, says,</p><p>“I derailed you earlier. Sorry. You were about to tell me why you thought I’d come to talk. ” </p><p>She’s still not sure that they’re on the same page about what not talking means or even what page that is, but how’s she supposed to figure it out without some investigation? Without some trial and error?</p><p>Torres takes a long draft and then:</p><p>“Uh. Well. Everybody else had left the dinner, so it was just Chakotay and me, and he’d had a little to drink. He gets sentimental when he drinks. So, uh. He told me about the Angry Warrior thing. So when you showed up at my doorstep tonight, I thought maybe you needed a sounding board about it, too.” Kathryn hums, says,</p><p>“I can see your logic, but.” She pauses. She really doesn’t want to talk about it, especially not with someone she’s attracted to. Oof where had that sudden honesty with herself come from?</p><p>It’s a record player vs. tomato plants situation. What makes her feel like a person? What has any concrete dividends? What can she successfully manipulate?</p><p>But still, she is curious. She continues,</p><p>“I’d rather leave New Earth to New Earth for the time being. But what did Chakotay say about it?”</p><p>“Chakotay’s my friend, and I don’t want to betray his confidence. All I’m willing to disclose is that he’s in love with you and you didn’t explicitly confirm or deny your feelings for him and he’s sad about it,” Torres says. They look at each other. Kathryn says,</p><p>“Well. I’m sorry he’s sad about it. But I’m a Starfleet captain—” It’s lame, and she feels bad dragging it out.</p><p>“You weren’t a Starfleet captain there and then, though,” Torres says. She flicks the tab of her beer can with her fingernail. “There’s more to it than that, but you don’t want to talk about it. And that’s fine by me. I just wanted to let you know that if you did need somebody to talk to…” Torres pauses. “I can probably recommend somebody.” </p><p>Kathryn stares at her face. She’d said it deadpan, but there are crinkles of mirth at the corners of her eyes. She shoves Torres’s shoulder. It had started off a jocular shove, just to show that she had acknowledged the joke, but she doesn’t remove her hand when the shove is finished, and it’s Kathryn’s cool palm against Torres’s warm shoulder, smooth skin against smooth skin. Their eyes meet. Kathryn looks away first, but her hand remains.</p><p>Torres looks over at the hand on her shoulder and then back at Kathryn’s eyes. She says,</p><p>“I think I’m ready to not talk now.”</p><p> “I’ve been ready,” Kathryn says. She takes in a breath, waits for Torres to do something. Torres taps a finger against the back of Kathryn’s hand, says,</p><p>“I’m about halfway through an incredibly shitty Obsidian Order novel. You want me to fill you in on relevant plot points and read it aloud to you until I’m too blitzed to enunciate and then we both pass out on my couch and wake up hungover with cricks in our respective necks?” Kathryn lets out the breath, relieved but also maybe a little disappointed. That’s stupid, though. She squeezes Torres’s shoulder, says,</p><p>“You’re really willing to do that for me? And let me drink half your beer?”</p><p>“Why not? It’s what I was going to do anyway tonight. Well, I wasn’t going to be reading <em>aloud</em> alone in my quarters. But that’s hardly any labor at all, and—don’t tell anybody—but I like doing it. As for the beer, well. You can provide the liquor next time.”</p><p>“Next time?” Kathryn says, the flutter back in her stomach.</p><p>“Maybe I’m reading this wrong. But. We both have a lot of stuff we don’t want to talk about, don’t we? And we seem to like not talking about it together.” Kathryn squeezes her shoulder a final time and removes her hand, says,</p><p>“You’re not reading this wrong.” She’s glad she’d changed into her comfy cableknit sweater and leggings before she’d started wandering around the ship. She slips off her tennies and places them beneath the coffee table so they won’t trip over them if they need to go to the bathroom or anything and repositions herself more comfortably on the couch. “So who’s who and what’s what in this incredibly shitty Obsidian Order novel?”</p><p>It’s been a long time since she’s had a brownout drinking, especially drinking beer, but Kathryn’s very confused when she wakes up in a bed that is not hers with a well-muscled forearm that is not hers draped over her torso.</p><p>And then it comes to her in a patchy stream: </p><p>Torres squinting an eye shut and trying to focus on her PADD and saying,</p><p>“Think I’m about at my limit.”</p><p>Her with her legs sprawled in Torres’s lap saying,</p><p>“Me, too. But I can’t pass out on your couch without brushing my teeth first.”</p><p>Her stumbling to the replicator, saying,</p><p>“Computer, replicator, please. Toothbrush. Soft bristles. With the thing on the back. You know. The thing. The knobbies that do the inside of your cheeks.”</p><p>The computer saying,</p><p>“Restate parameters.”</p><p>The feeling of Torres’s body heat against her back, the puff of yeasty breath against her neck. Torres saying,</p><p>“That’s the kind I use, too.” Torres saying louder, deliberately articulated, “Toothbrush, Pattern Torres Upsilon. Color: Red.”</p><p>Their brushing their teeth side by side in Torres’s bathroom with identical toothbrushes except Torres’s had been yellow. Then flossing. Then mouthwashing.</p><p>Then Torres saying,</p><p>“We’re already off the couch. No need to be hungover <em>and</em> have a crick in our necks.”</p><p>Then Torres’s pretty obviously contraband 500-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and immediate, dreamless sleep.</p><p>There’s a sharp pain above and behind her left eye, and she’s very hot and very thirsty. And she’s trying very hard not to be aroused at the thought and feeling of being in Torres’s bed.</p><p>And Edith Piaf is thrashing around in her box.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Episode: 2.26-3.01 Basics</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s not as if Kathryn hadn’t liked Seska. </p><p>She had. </p><p>She’s always had a soft spot for rogues and assholes and strays. Especially if the rogue/asshole/stray in question is clever and funny and beautiful.</p><p>That’s stupid, though.</p><p>She hadn’t really even known Seska that well. She mostly knows that her performance in engineering had been adequate and that Chakotay and Torres—whom she trusts and relies on—had thought highly of her. And that she’d had very cute dimples.</p><p>Her favorite aunt had often invited her to join her and her redneck posse to tool around in the dead of night in four-wheel-drive Jeeps equipped with bright, blinding fog lights and fully stocked with cheap beer and shotguns to go hunt coyotes. She’d always declined. Yes, the coyotes had been out of control—killing chickens and running wild, dangerously overpopulated. If it had been more about ecological balance, more scientific and clinical and specifically directed, she might have gotten on board. It’d been too much of a drunken carnival atmosphere than a targeted environmental effort, so she’d never been able to bring herself to shoot one basically for the fun of it just because the animal had been doing what it’s best suited to do.</p><p>Cardassians are not the same as coyotes, and neither are the Kazon. There are some parallels—if there hadn’t been something similar, surely she wouldn’t have been thinking about that far-off memory—but they’re not wild animals; they’re sentient, civilized species who ought to know better. </p><p>They do know better. They’re just cruel for the sake of being cruel. She knows this about both of them first hand a couple times over by now. </p><p>Maybe before she’d gotten stranded in the Delta Quadrant, when she’d been so close to her staunchly Starfleet family—except for that redneck aunt, of course—and her middle-of-the-road political ties, she could’ve had a good reason as to why she hadn’t joined the Maquis. But now, with all she knows and all she’s seen, she’d have to jump through the loop of her ass not to be radicalized.</p><p>She puts on an early twenty-first century pop record. All mellow and dreamy synth with a lot of innuendo involving tropical fruit, probably some oblique reference to cunnilingous.</p><p>She laughs out loud.</p><p>When had been the last time she’d indulged in that? Amelia Earhart had been a 1930s Kansas Protestant prude about it. Mark had been enthusiastic but mediocre at it, so she’d usually demurred. There’d been some anonymous randos between Mark and Justin, convenient but not especially skillful. Justin had been very good at it but hadn’t preferred it and so it had been infrequent, special occasions only. The last really good, mutually enjoyed time had probably been with her History of The Federation graduate student TA. She’d been half Andorian and had had a lot of tricks involving her antennae.</p><p>She stands at her viewport and rolls her shoulders out. She tries to absorb the chill ease of the music rather than the covertly sexual vibe. She doesn’t need that energy right now, shouldn’t have given it a passing thought in the first place.</p><p>Whatever she gets from her record player and the EPs she’s stupidly decided to put on, it’s good to be back. </p><p>It’s not that she doesn’t like roughing it. She’d just prefer camping while still in possession of her ship and not being actively hunted by indigenous peoples or while not having a virus and thinking she’ll be roughing it for the rest of her life with only one other person to look at forever. Beggars can’t be choosers, she supposes, with another laugh.</p><p>The door chimes.</p><p>“Come in,” Kathryn says. There’s only a small handful of people who would be so bold as to disturb her currently with the mood she’s in, so she’s reasonably certain that whoever it is at her door is a person she can probably stand to look at. But still, she doesn’t turn.</p><p>“Hi,” Torres’s voice says. </p><p>Of course it’s her. Here to talk or not talk. She can endure Torres, can probably even enjoy Torres. She blinks back memories of waking up in Torres’s bed, shoves those images into her Edith Piaf box along with her earlier lewd musings.</p><p>They’d never finished that Obsidian Order novel, and she wonders briefly whatever happened to Gul whatever his name was and his Bajoran concubine and her plot to destroy him. Eh. Who cares? The Obsidian Order novel they’d just lived through had been more exciting, anyway.</p><p>“Hi,” Kathryn says, still staring out her viewport.</p><p>“Don’t want to bother you,” Torres says. Kathryn does turn then.</p><p>“You’re never a bother,” Kathryn says.</p><p>They look at each other.</p><p>“Really?” Torres says.</p><p>“Really,” Kathryn says. Torres takes a step into her quarters, says,</p><p>“Even if I told you I’d had my suspicions about Seska?”</p><p>“You’d’ve been a fool not to have had suspicions about her,” Kathryn says.</p><p>“But I was more of a fool not to have acted on those suspicions.”</p><p>They lock eyes. There’s a lot of guilt there in Torres’s eyes, a lot of tiredness, a lot of anger. She feels the same way.</p><p>“We can only make the decisions presented to us,” Kathryn says. “You didn’t have the right information, and Seska made her own decisions.”</p><p>“And all of them were fucked up,” Torres says.</p><p>“No doubt,” Kathryn says. “But we survived it.”</p><p>“Is that all you want, Kathryn? Just survival? Or do you want to live, too?”</p><p>She’s had the time to analyze her previous experiment, and she’s come to some startling conclusions—or perhaps mundane conclusions, obvious to anyone who had been paying attention—but.</p><p>But she just can’t justify doing anything about it now that she’s just recently realized how very alone and vulnerable they all are.</p><p>It had come in waves—the realization, the guilt. At first, watching the Caretaker’s Array go off like fireworks, it had been so unfathomable and then it had been “yes, I did this” and then there had been an almost comfortable period of “this sucks, but we’re trucking along,” but this latest catastrophe where the only safety and comfort they all had known had been stripped from them and they’d been deposited onto a hostile planet. What a wave that had been. It might break her.</p><p>If her record player hadn’t been murmuring to her, and if Torres hadn’t said anything or at the very least if she hadn’t been standing there so casually gorgeous in her gym clothes, looking at her so intensely, she might believe surviving and living are the same.</p><p>“I do want to live, B’Elanna. I’m just not sure how, given our circumstances.”</p><p>“Yeah, me neither,” Torres says. A beat passes and then Torres says, “It's good to be back home, though.”</p><p>“Yes,” Kathryn says. Another beat passes. “So. Did you have a particular reason for dropping by?”</p><p>“No. On my way to the gym and just. Haven’t seen you around much since we got the ship back and felt like I ought to stop in and say ‘hi.’” Kathryn doesn’t think, just says,</p><p>“Do you need a spotter?” Torres grins, says,</p><p>“Let me guess: you can recommend someone?” Kathryn laughs.</p><p>“Give me a minute to get changed. I could do with a little exercise that isn’t lugging boulders to create a shelter.”</p><p>It’s easier to ask the question now that Torres is on the other side of a door. She’s not even sure where the question had come from or why she suddenly wants to know:</p><p>“Were you and Seska close, then?”</p><p>She pointedly strips out of her trousers first so that the answer won’t be muffled further by fabric.</p><p>But the answer doesn’t come immediately. She unzips her jacket and starts rummaging around in her dresser, ears perked for any movement in the living room.</p><p>“It’s probably not something you want to discuss. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry,” she says as she pulls out some bike shorts and a tank top.</p><p>“Just. Unexpected is all. We— I’d thought we were close. Sometimes, anyway,” Torres says. There’s a pause. Kathryn’s halfway out of her undershirt, and she pauses, sensing, hoping Torres is going to say more. There’s a chuckle. She’d put money on its being an embarrassed one, and Torres says, a little strained, “The thing is. Chakotay and I kind of have the same questionable taste in women.” Kathryn fumbles with her undershirt, gets stuck briefly, says,</p><p>“Oh. That’s. And she picked him over you. I’m sorry.” As she’s switching from underwire to sport, she hears Torres sigh, and then:</p><p>“Dodged a bullet, really. I’d feel a lot worse than I already do if— Well anyway. It probably wasn’t about anything more than logistics. It’d have been a lot more invasive and complicated a procedure to manufacture a baby with me. And even if she did somehow accomplish that, there wouldn’t have been as much incentive to go rescue it.”</p><p>Kathryn impulsively and immediately steps through the door at that so that Torres can see the earnestness in her face as she says,</p><p>“B’Elanna. I see what you’re saying, but I want you to make no mistake: I would’ve fought just as hard for a baby that was allegedly yours.” </p><p>Torres blinks rapidly and then averts her eyes, croaks out,</p><p>“Thanks, Captain. That’s kind of you.”</p><p>“You think I’m just feeding you platitudes?”</p><p>“No, um—” Torres is blushing from chest to ears to hairline and has her hands clenched into fists at her sides.</p><p>Shit fuck. She’d forgotten all about her nudity in her haste to console Torres. She’d not yet successfully switched over to her sports bra and is in fact standing in her living room having a conversation with her Chief Engineer in only her Starfleet issue black briefs. She could die on the spot, and from the looks of it, Torres shares that feeling. There’s not a lot of great ways to salvage this. She decides on pretending it’s totally normal, says,</p><p>“Good. Because I mean it.” She returns to her bedroom and sits on the bed, runs a hand over her face.</p><p>She sits there for probably a whole minute in the taut silence and then finds her sports bra where she’d thrown it down to march, tits out, to say dumb shit. She takes a deep breath. It’s fine. They had both played sports. They’ve both been in plenty of locker rooms. This is only as weird as she will allow it to be.</p><p>There’s a soft knock at the door jamb as the door swishes open. Torres is standing there with her jaw set, her shoulders tense.</p><p>“I know you meant what you said. And you know what I meant when I said Chakotay and I have the same taste in women.” She’d certainly suspected, but she’s not letting herself think about it.</p><p>“B’Elanna—”</p><p>“I get it. You can’t. But I’ve got to know, for my own sanity. Did you want to?”</p><p>“Yes,” Kathryn says. She owes her the truth at least. Torres flinches and turns to retreat, and Kathryn realizes her error. Torres had said “did” rather than “do,” referencing Chakotay and New Earth rather than herself here and now, and the hurt in her face confirms it. “B’Elanna. Wait. I think I misunderstood the question.”</p><p>Torres halts in the doorway, and Kathryn stands up, places a hand on her shoulder—her bare, warm, smooth, toned shoulder. Torres shivers under her touch, growls,</p><p>“Guess I should’ve been more explicit. Did you want to fuck Chakotay when you were on that planet together?”</p><p>“No.” Kathryn pulls at Torres’s shoulder so that she’ll turn and look at her. “I want.” She swallows and stares into Torre’s angry, shining eyes. “I want you.”</p><p>Torres’s fingers are suddenly grasping the naked, ticklish flesh of her obliques, pulling her into her and kissing her hard and deep and athletic, her tongue dexterous and forceful, staking claim in her mouth. Kathryn lets herself enjoy it, enjoy being kissed so thoroughly and expertly and passionately. Lets herself enjoy being roughly handled, enjoy being tossed onto her bed, enjoy being pawed at and maneuvered and kissed and kissed and kissed.</p><p>Had anyone else ever just taken her like this? No. They’d been too intimidated by her or too tentative because of their own insecurities or so slow and gentle because they had been somehow under the impression she had been fragile.</p><p>She desperately wants to know if her theory that that tongue is as confident and talented in other locations as it is against her soft palate. She’d neglected to turn off that record that had gotten her going earlier, and it’s still playing in the other room, just the mellow bass line and some reverb filtering in, suggesting and nudging.</p><p>But. She’d decided long ago, and she'd doubled down on that decision after she’d had her ship stolen. She can’t just flagrantly be happy when everyone else is miserable. She presses her palm up against Torres’s breastbone, pushes gently, says breathlessly,</p><p>“We shouldn’t.”</p><p>Torres looks down at her. Her face is flushed and her hair is in disarray and her eyes are ablaze with lust. Kathryn closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at her. It’s too much. She wants her too much to be able to stand looking at her.</p><p>“No one has to know,” Torres whispers.</p><p>“But I would know,” Kathryn whispers back.</p><p>“And what would be so bad about that?” Kathryn opens her eyes then and looks at Torres. There’s no subterfuge, no manipulation in Torres’s eyes. It’s an honest question, and she doesn’t have an honest answer. Torres understands her official position and is offering an off-the-books refuge. It’s tempting. If only she were an anonymous rando rather than someone she’s half in love with already. The former could work. The latter is dangerous.</p><p>“The costs outweigh the benefits,” Kathryn says finally. She cups Torres’s cheek, says, “I can’t just fuck you. I like you too much.” Torres closes her eyes, leans into Kathryn’s palm, says,</p><p>“One of the best rejections I’ve ever received.” She kisses Kathryn’s palm and then hoists herself off the bed. She smooths down her clothes. “I won’t be needing a spotter, after all. I think I’ll just run on the treadmill until I puke.”</p><p>Torres exits.</p><p>Kathryn lies flat on her back staring at the ceiling willing herself to not think about anything until the needle of her record player zips up as Side A ends.</p><p>Fuck it.</p><p>She puts on Edith Piaf.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Episode: 3.06 Remember</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s not as if Kathryn hates herself. She doesn’t.</p><p>Most days, anyway. </p><p>And not a lot, anyway.</p><p>Although she doesn’t like the consequences of a lot of her decisions, she’s pretty confident about the decisions themselves—she’s pretty confident that she had made the decisions in accordance with her ideals and beliefs, that she had made the best decisions available to her.</p><p>That redneck aunt had been something of a philosopher. It’s inevitable when one is an ambivert constantly in contact with a variety of people and prone to long spells of solitary contemplation. She’d run a tractor supply and service operation, and so she’d always been surrounded by people talking at her. Mostly farmers, of course, but her brother, Kathryn’s dad, had liked to bring her to Starfleet parties, too. She could be as cosmopolitan and intellectual as any admiral and could talk military strategy to them just as well as she could overhaul a transmission. </p><p>It had been when she’d been getting ready for one of these events and Kathryn had been helping pin up her French twist that she’d said,</p><p>“You know why I go to these things?”</p><p>“Free champagne?” Kathryn had said. </p><p>“Well yes, of course. And I’ve got a healthy dose of self-loathing.”</p><p>Kathryn had always wondered about that. She’d tried to ask, but Aunt Fred (a nickname for Jennifer) had just laughed her off and had her clasp her necklace.</p><p>She’d come to think maybe Aunt Fred had subjected herself to stuff like that that she hadn’t liked as a form of self-harm, to feel the pain of it so she could enjoy her real life more when she would return to it. Or to punish herself for her perceived sins. After all, the whole family had wanted and expected her to join Starfleet. She’d done a tour in the MACOs and then had decided she could serve her community better by selling barbed wire and fixing tractors. She’d always seemed happy in her life choices, but this thing she’d said in private just the once. Kathryn still wonders about it.</p><p>Maybe Kathryn herself would be happier selling barbed wire and fixing tractors.</p><p>But more than that, what is a healthy dose of self-loathing? Is that a real thing?</p><p>Should Kathryn hate herself more? Or is the amount she does good enough? Is it too much?</p><p>In honor of the aunt that’s got her thinking this stuff tonight, she’s got a Wanda Jackson record on. But it’s serving only to make her feel crazy—all the rockabilly riffs and murder. She doesn’t need that energy. </p><p>Who had it been that Aunt Fred would always put on when she and Phoebe would help her with her burn pile, when she would be in a very particular melancholy mood and they could coerce her into telling both MACO stories and stories of her lost loves?</p><p>Oh yeah. Rosanne Cash.</p><p>So she’s sitting with Rosanne Cash and a glass of bourbon and her own self-loathing, wondering if it’s an unhealthy dose. The bourbon’s unhealthy, for sure. And country-western music is borderline. She’s probably got the self-loathing under control for the most part, though.</p><p>It’s kind of always there as white noise as she executes daily tasks, always knowing the decisions she’s made that have affected so many people in so many ways. That’s what being a Starfleet captain is. That’s what being a leader is in general.</p><p>But the thing that’s made her self-loathing dial into a discernible frequency rather than its usual static tonight is this latest bullshit that had happened to Torres. It’s not the bullshit itself, per se. Bullshit happens to all of them every day.</p><p>(Once again, she’s back to the idea that maybe the whole Delta Quadrant is just nuts. She’s almost got a scientific theory about it going: at the Big Bang, everything had been flung into space, and there’s some attractive agent in the Delta Quadrant—an element or a gravitational anomaly or something—that had collected all the weirdest shit. Or perhaps all the weirdest shit had been mutually attracted and drifted there together. It needs work, but it’s a starting point.)</p><p>Of course, it’s not not the bullshit. If she had a strip of latinum for every time they’d been either collectively or individually dicked around by a psychic alien… (She’ll have to work the psychic angle into her theory of Delta Quadrant asshole chaos later.) She feels the regular responsibility about how Torres had been manipulated, the regular guilt about it, the regular self-loathing about it. But on top of that.</p><p>She really wants to talk to Torres about it. Or let her not talk about it. Either way, let her have a place to just be with her feelings about it. The whole experience had to have been a trip and a half, and she knows Torres well enough to know that it’ll take her a while to be over it.</p><p>But how’s Torres supposed to trust her with anything after the absolute cockup that had been their last private discussion?</p><p>Sure. They’ve been able to work together since then without friction. But they’re both so goal-oriented when they’re on duty. Work is work, and they both like work, thrive in work, can see past themselves in work. </p><p>A private discussion is different.</p><p>Does it have to be, though? Surely, she’d be able to provide comfort without being a total horny trash person. And surely Torres would be able to discern her motives as being merely to support and listen. Surely they could both put aside their sex nonsense to connect in a more significant, edifying way. Maybe so, maybe not.</p><p>She sinks into her divan, drinking her bourbon, listening to Rosanne Cash, reading the rest of that Obsidian Order novel.</p><p>She remembers laughing out loud at the idiotic conclusion of the Obsidian Order novel. She remembers wrapping a thin, navy cotton robe around her pink satin nightgown. She remembers the weight of a half-full bottle of bourbon in the robe’s pocket. She even remembers pressing the chime at Torres’s door.</p><p>What she can’t remember is why she’d thought this course of action would be a good idea. She doesn’t have time to analyze that because the door swishes open, and Torres is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a lot of miscellaneous parts of that Enaran musical instrument that guy had psychically taught Kathryn to play strewn in front of her. Torres has obviously been picking through the detritus and is in the process of reverse-engineering it.</p><p>Torres had allowed her entrance without having looked up from her project.</p><p>Kathryn steps into her quarters just far enough that the door closes behind her.</p><p>“Did you ever finish that shitty spy novel?” Kathryn says.</p><p>“Nope. No plans to, either.”</p><p>“You’re not curious how it ends?” Torres looks up then, says,</p><p>“Let me guess: you did finish it, and you need somebody to make fun of it with you?”</p><p>“Am I that transparent?” Torres hums, says,</p><p>“You also did that deliberately so you’d have an excuse to come talk to me but not about anything real that neither of us want to talk about.”</p><p>“Fucking A, B’Elanna. You could’ve just said ‘yes’ and left it at that.” Torres laughs.</p><p>“I wanted to impress you with how intuitive I can be.” Kathryn forces herself to roll her eyes so she doesn’t say something corny about how impressive she already finds her in so many ways.</p><p>That’s the shit fuck of it all. She never fails to be impressed by her. Her mind, her skill, her kindness, her toughness. Ok, her body, too. Torres is currently in a pair of sweats and a tank top, hair half wet and curling dry, and Kathryn hadn’t known her hair is naturally curly until they’d all been stranded on that planet and wonders why she always straightens it. It’s pretty in its natural state, and she’s glad to see it in a more hospitable setting. Not that it’s not pretty straightened, of course. But still. Maybe it’s a hang up she has about being half Klingon or something.</p><p>“Well? Are you going to pour me some of that whiskey in your pocket and tell me what Gul Zadaar ever got up to, or are you just gonna stand there staring at me all night?” Torres says.</p><p>“Just seeing how long you’d let me stand here staring at you before you said something.” Torres clicks her tongue. </p><p>In order not to look at whatever look on her face had accompanied that click of tongue, Kathryn crosses to the replicator where to the left there’s a shelf crammed with miscellaneous glass and earthenware. She could’ve left her bourbon at home and used her own replicator rations to get them drinks here. But she’d figured it’d be more of a gesture if she were to show up with a physical bottle, an obvious token of reciprocity and goodwill.</p><p>She glugs a few fingers into a homemade coffee mug shaped like a leola root and another few fingers into a translucent green glass tumbler of indeterminate origin. She sets the tumbler on the coffee table and reclines on the couch with the coffee mug. She’s looking over Torres’s shoulder, watching her hands glide over the circuitry of the innards of the musical instrument.</p><p>“As anyone could have predicted, the Bajoran concubine continues fucking her way to the top,” Kathryn says. “But then, instead of any kind of catharsis, the whole thing ends not with her owning her power but with Gul Zadaar faking his death and living on a houseboat in Mississippi, making a living catching and selling crawdads.”</p><p>Torres looks over her shoulder at her, says,</p><p>“Please tell me you’re dicking with me and that isn’t an actual published story.”</p><p>“Cross my heart,” Kathryn says. Torres shakes her head in bemusement, takes a drink of the bourbon, says,</p><p>“You subjected yourself to that bullshit for my sake? I’m honored.” She takes another drink and then turns back to her previous activities.</p><p>Kathryn watches her again, for a long time. Not a long time objectively. But a long enough time that Torres observably feels her gaze and becomes visibly tenser and stiffer. And the tenseness and stiffness is too enticing.</p><p>Kathryn downs the rest of her bourbon and discards her mug on the side table. She repositions herself on the couch and places her chilly fingers on Torres’s trapezius. Torres flinches, but she doesn’t remove her hands. Instead, she begins to knead, to dig in, to work knots all the way down to rhomboids and lats and erector spinae.</p><p>Soon, Torres has abandoned the parts and pieces in front of her and is leaning back into Kathryn’s ministrations, making a lot of soft sounds low in her throat.</p><p>Kathryn had started this mostly on impulse—a beneficent impulse to soothe and to comfort. But now that her hands are on Torres’s hot skin. Now that she’s being allowed access to Torres’s hot skin. </p><p>Fuck and a half. </p><p>She retreats, removes herself. And she stands, says,</p><p>“Well. A shitty ending for a shitty novel.”</p><p>She sways just a bit with all the bourbon sloshing in her. She makes for the door, but Torres is up now, too, a firm hand at her elbow.</p><p>“Kathryn. Please. Sit with me a while longer?”</p><p>She’s not sure whether it's the Kathryn or the please or the look in her eyes. It’s probably just her own yearning.</p><p>They drink the rest of the bourbon, and they talk but don’t talk some more.</p><p>Kathryn’s too drunk to make it back to Deck 3 but not too drunk to not brush her teeth with the toothbrush Torres had kept for her.</p><p>Kathryn’s not drunk enough to think it’s a good idea to sleep in Torres’s bed with her. But she’s just drunk enough to do it anyway.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Episode: 3.16 Blood Fever</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It’s not as if Kathryn doesn’t like Tom Paris.</p><p>She does, probably more than most. Probably more than is reasonable.</p><p>He’s a lot more honorable and decent and intelligent and loyal than most people give him credit for, and Kathryn respects him for his abilities and generally appreciates that he so thoroughly enjoys his oddball special interests and so frequently exercises his silly sense of humor.</p><p>But she can’t help herself. </p><p>She hates him right now.</p><p>It’s a base impulse, and she doesn’t want to acknowledge it.</p><p>But she’s got to admit, at least to herself, she’s always been the jealous type.</p><p>That’s stupid, though.</p><p>There’s nothing to be jealous of. Torres had been under the influence of alien hormones, had reacted in the only way she could. Tom Paris had been the available target. Or maybe that’s not the full story. Maybe there are feelings there. She wouldn’t know. She and Torres don’t talk about that sort of thing.</p><p>Still. Either way. She hates him for it. </p><p>She has to physically shake herself out of imagining what it would have been like to be the one thrown against a cave wall and bitten.</p><p>Maybe she hates Paris because he’d resisted Torres’s advances for better reasons than she’d resisted those weeks earlier. He’d resisted because he hadn’t wanted to take advantage. She’d resisted because of arbitrary bullshit. His reason is the better one, and she hates herself for it and hates him for it even more. </p><p>It’s stupid, but if she doesn’t confront it, how will she get over it?</p><p>And ain’t that a kick in the head. She could say the same thing to herself about so many things she’s been stuffing into her Edith Piaf box.</p><p>Maybe it’s time to go through the box and decide what goes to the thrift shop, what goes to the dumpster, and what gets put in a different box with other sentimental trinkets that are looked at and cried over every five years or so when you’re doing a deep clean and happen to stumble across the box accidentally and masochistically take out and caress each item and lose two hours of cleaning time doing so.</p><p>Spring cleaning in her childhood household had never included this ritual because her mother had had no such boxes of tricky stuff. Gretchen is a tidy, efficient woman. Not unsentimental, but contained and organized in her sentimentality—pictures in files according to date and persons involved, significant objects in a neat line on the mantelpiece and/or designated shelves.</p><p>But when Aunt Fred had wanted—when Kathryn had been about seventeen, Phoebe about fifteen—to finally put up drywall and lay real flooring in her attic, Kathryn had been voluntold for that unpaid labor and had subsequently been introduced to the concept of boxes throbbing with troubling miscellany. </p><p>The burn pile had been so robust that spring, and she and Phoebe had prodded Aunt Fred into so many Rosanne Cash nights when Aunt Fred would stare glassy-eyed into the fire and tell tales that never had had quite the high number and high intensity of details that Kathryn and Phoebe had longed for.</p><p>But all that’s so far away, so long ago.</p><p>Now, though.</p><p>Now, she’s in her Ready Room, walking the circuit of it to keep her body occupied even if she can’t keep her mind occupied with anything productive.</p><p>It’s well into Beta shift, very close to Gamma, and by all accounts she ought to be done for the day.</p><p>But her Ready Room has its benefits.</p><p>There’s no record player here. So there are no pops and cracks to remind her she’s a person. Granted.</p><p>There’s no record player here. So it’s all computer-generated, algorithmic playlists based on listening history. Granted.</p><p>There’s no record player here, and there’s no booze here. And that’s more to the point.</p><p>So she can take her laps and think her thoughts without being tempted to barge into Torres’s quarters, alcohol bold and stupid.</p><p>So she can intermittently focus on spreadsheets and statistics and duty rosters and just as intermittently ignore all of those things and pace around frantically, the tinny music from her desk speakers loud in her ears, and coffee enough for an eye twitch.</p><p>Any way she slices it, it’s all pretty terrible, honestly.</p><p>But her Ready Room is safe at least. Not sane, exactly, but safe. Neutral. Professional.</p><p>It’s around 2100 when she decides to take a tour of the ship. She’ll make the rounds, see that everything is running smoothly, and go to bed early. Or flop around for a while and get up and read a book just not boring enough to keep her from zoning out but not not boring enough to keep her up half the night.</p><p>She wonders if that Obsidian Order author has any more novels in the database. That had been asinine in the exact right way to wind down to. Maybe that’s why Torres had been reading it in the first place. Maybe she’s got the same kind of insomnia Kathryn does.</p><p>Best not think about Torres, especially in bedroom or bedroom-adjacent contexts. </p><p>That second time she’d stayed the night, she’d woken up in the morning to find Torres propped on her elbow, staring at her. Kathryn had braced herself for how weird it would be to hear the kinds of things other people whom she’d woken up in bed with staring at her like that had said coming out of Torres’s mouth. But Torres had said instead,</p><p>“You know, if you do it right, a whiskey hangover is actually kind of pleasant.” </p><p>“Did we do it right last night, then?”</p><p>“Afraid not. We’ll have to try again sometime.”</p><p>Kathryn had hummed noncommittally, full well knowing she should put a stop to their drunken overnights because surely given enough time and opportunity, one of them would slip up and make a move and the other would not put on the brakes, and they’d have to have a very different conversation in the morning. But she’d been unwilling to give it up.</p><p>Selfish, probably.</p><p>She supposes she doesn’t have to worry about that now.</p><p>Once your gal pals get boyfriends, they don’t want to have sleepovers with you anymore. Even if you had thought you’d both enjoyed all that practice kissing.</p><p>Probably for the best. Probably for the best not to have that kind of temptation lurking around every disaster’s corner. Surely they’ll still get together to not talk after disasters, and that’s the best part anyway.</p><p>What color is Tom Paris’s toothbrush in Torres’s bathroom? Maybe she has a yellow one in his quarters. Maybe they’re not even a thing.</p><p>Maybe it’s none of her business.</p><p>She’s made it now to Deck 11. Joe Carey’s organizing a football game in Holodeck 1 for the weekend after next, and she wants to offer to design the setting—crisp Indiana fall, maybe a Thanksgiving dinner in a cozy farmhouse afterward. The food’ll be somebody else’s problem, though.</p><p>She sees the top of his head bobbing on the other side of the warp core, and as she crosses what she had thought had been empty space, she trips over something.</p><p>It’s a pair of legs sticking out from under a console.</p><p>“Excuse me! Sorry! No permanent damage, I hope,” she says and waits for the legs to respond, to see if the legs are okay.</p><p>Torres rolls her creeper out from under the console, says,</p><p>“I’m pretty thick skinned. I think I’ll live.”</p><p>“Glad to hear it. But. What are you doing here?”</p><p>“I work here. What are you doing here?”</p><p>“It’s my ship. I can be wherever I want.”</p><p>“So you’re not just down here to check up on me?” Torres says, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. Before she can stop herself, she says,</p><p>“Don’t I usually wait until you’re at home and bring liquor when I check up on you?” Torres seems to be on the verge of saying something and then doesn’t. Instead, she sits up and wipes her palms on her slacks and says finally,</p><p>“I guess that’s right. And if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” She grins up at Kathryn. So Torres does want to continue their get-togethers. Interesting. More pressingly though:</p><p>“But really, B’Elanna, I thought you were supposed to be in sickbay still.”</p><p>“Got out on good behavior.”</p><p>If it hadn’t been Gamma shift with nobody around or if it had been a Gamma shift and they were actually on duty, Kathryn wouldn't have allowed herself to say,</p><p>“Bullshit. The Doctor considers even your good behavior bad behavior.” Torres shrugs, says,</p><p>“Turns out, kicking the holy living dogshit out of somebody really works wonders for my health. You ought to consider urging the Doctor to prescribe that to me about once a month or so.”</p><p>“If it works only with other crewmen, I think I’ll take a pass.”</p><p>“I’m sure anybody would do. Gotta be flesh and blood though. I think my body would know it was a trick if it were a hologram.”</p><p>“I’ll consult my Starfleet First Contact manual and get back to you.”</p><p>“We could consult it together. I’m just about done here. Meet in my quarters in ten? By my estimation, it’s my turn to supply the hooch.”</p><p>“Do you think that’s wise?” In rapid succession: her first thought had been about the likelihood of a sexy event, given Torres’s heightened hormones of the last few days; her second thought had been about cuckolding Tom Paris, which would inevitably feel both temporarily glorious and then absolutely horrible in its vindictiveness; her third thought had been the one fit to voice: “The Doctor didn’t load you down with a list of stipulations as long as my arm, including but not limited to, ‘Don’t consume alcohol until after I’ve cleared you at our follow-up appointment next week’?”</p><p>“Nope. Deemed me 1-A and released me on my own recognizance.”</p><p>Kathryn’s bold and stupid sober, too. She says without thinking,</p><p>“Make it fifteen and my quarters. You can pick the record we listen to as we don’t talk.” Torres skims her tongue over her top teeth, says,</p><p>“Yes, ma’am.”</p><p>Kathryn thinks about changing her sheets. But all she’s got in the linen closet is more Starfleet-issue gray rayon. She doesn’t have any contraband luxury, and even if she did. Even if she did, she shouldn’t be anticipating and planning for something that shouldn’t happen and probably won’t. Even if it’s just passing out after having imbibed too much, it shouldn’t happen and probably won’t. Torres will probably arrive with a six pack, and they’ll both get a little looser but not even tipsy really, and Torres will leave on a pithy remark.</p><p>She takes off her uniform and slides into a flannel shirt and a pair of loose linen shorts and sits on the couch with a PADD, searching the database for that Obsidian Order author.</p><p>He—of course it’s a he with all those fatuous caricatures of female characters—is quite prolific, and she chooses a title that seems to be a western except instead of cowboys it’s the Maquis. And her door chimes. She immediately grants the request, staring at the door jamb with a hammering heart.</p><p>That’s stupid, though.</p><p>Yeah, it’s stupid, but it is what it is. She’d better get used to it or find some way to shut it down.</p><p>Torres enters. She’s wearing joggers and a v-neck t-shirt, and she’s got a satchel slung across her chest.</p><p>She removes her tennis shoes and places them tidily against the wall next to the door frame, and then she removes the satchel. She rummages inside it and produces from it a bottle of Andorian gin, a bottle of Klingon bloodwine, and a bottle of Earth vodka. She sets them up in a row on the coffee table and tosses the satchel over to join her shoes.</p><p>“We’ve tried our luck with beer and bourbon. So I brought some different options,” Torres says. </p><p>Kathryn knows she gets weepy with vodka, and the one time she’d had Andorian gin she’d thought it a marvelous idea to order up a lap dance at a Risa strip club. </p><p>She doubts bloodwine will do her right, but she chooses it anyway as the unknown of three evils.</p><p>Kathryn pours drinks as Torres pores through her record collection.</p><p>Torres puts on Linda Ronstadt.</p><p>And then she sits on the divan, right next to Kathryn. Their thighs are brushing against each other as Torres takes up her glass of bloodwine. She takes a drink, says,</p><p>“Did you know that in baseball, they call an especially fast pitch a ‘Linda Ronstadt’?” Kathryn takes a drink. Geez, it’s strong. She says,</p><p>“No, I didn’t. Why do they call it that?”</p><p>“Because it blew by you.”</p><p>It takes Kathryn a second to get it.</p><p>The record Torres had put on doesn’t have Blue Bayou on it.</p><p>But she laughs, although a little belatedly, says,</p><p>“You got any other baseball trivia?”</p><p>“None that comes to mind,” Torres says.</p><p>“Good thing I don’t keep you around for that, then.”</p><p>“What do you keep me around for?” Torres says.</p><p>Kathryn runs her finger along the rim of her glass, doesn’t look at Torres as she says,</p><p>“I keep you around for plenty of reasons.”</p><p>“Enumerate and elucidate,” Torres says.</p><p>They look at each other. A beat passes.</p><p>“B’Elanna—”</p><p>“Kathryn—”</p><p>They both say at the same time.</p><p>And then they’re kissing, tangled up in each other with hands in hair and on triceps and on quadriceps, clawing at each other and kissing and kissing, tongues insistent in each other’s mouths. Torres has got her pinned in the crook of the couch, a knee between her legs.</p><p>Kathryn’s slipping a hand underneath Torres’s t-shirt when it bubbles out of her:</p><p>“Did you want to?”</p><p>“What?” Torres says, heaving, their lips millimeters apart.</p><p>“Did you want to fuck Paris during your Pon Farr?”</p><p>“Pon Farr is weird. I would’ve fucked Paris so I wouldn’t die. And I did beat up Vorik so I wouldn't die. But even in an altered state—I don’t really think I want to tell you this, but we’re being honest. When I bit him, I was thinking of you. If I could’ve bitten you, I would have. Kathryn. You’ve got to know.” </p><p>Torres kisses her again, and Kathryn does know.</p><p>“We can’t. We shouldn’t,” Kathryn says.</p><p>“We can, and we should, and we will,” Torres says.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The initial impetus of this story was my wanting to contribute to the handful of Pon Farr fics but feeling as though I first needed to create a thematically relevant and satisfying lead up. So.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Part two of chapter five rather than a chapter six.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“We can’t. We shouldn’t,” Kathryn says.</p><p>“We can, and we should, and we will,” Torres says.</p><p>Her eyes are blazing and feverish in their intensity, so close to Kathryn’s face and flitting over her features, analyzing her, asking her. </p><p>Kathryn knows she can still say no, that if she does, Torres will haul herself up heavily, say something like, “Next time I’ll do myself a favor and bring tequila. That’ll get you naked and feisty in a hurry.”</p><p>However. She doesn’t want to say no.</p><p>But what would it be like in the morning, waking up next to her knowing it hadn’t been out of drunken pragmatism that they’d shared a bed? Is she willing to trade a night of passion for the type of easy camaraderie they have in which they check on each other and drink together and read shitty books together and curse a blue streak together? </p><p>Because surely, if she allows this tonight, she’ll definitely have to stop just dropping by or letting Torres just drop by. Because if it’s happened once it’ll happen again.</p><p>You can’t put the cork back in the champagne, after all.</p><p>But maybe not. The last time they’d made out, everything had been fine afterward, and they’d successfully gotten drunk and co-slept with only the barest hint of anything untoward. This evening notwithstanding, of course.</p><p>And anyway, so what? Maybe it doesn’t matter if the Captain sleeps with (platonically or not) the Chief Engineer. It’s not like they’d be waltzing around the ship holding hands and sending out gold-embossed invitations to their engagement party. And it’s not like she’d be giving her easy assignments and keeping her out of dangerous situations. </p><p>Number one Torres wouldn’t stand for it, and number two she can’t afford it, not in this economy. </p><p>They’d just be… What? What would they just be? Doing all the same stuff they’d always done except with a little sex mixed in. Surely it wouldn’t change much.</p><p>That’s stupid, though. It would change something, wouldn’t it? Something about their expectations of each other. Something about their motives. Maybe all that had changed already.</p><p>At least part of her trepidation has been quelled slightly: She’d heard some of the rumors after the last time she’d been seen exiting Torres’s quarters at a highly suggestive hour of the morning. Crewman Chell and Crewman Foster had been working in a Jefferies tube near Holodeck 2, and she’d been on her way to go sailing with Chakotay, but she’d halted when she’d heard her name in the same sentence as Torres’s name. Foster had been saying, “I wouldn’t have put money on those two getting together, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me. And heavens above is it hot.” And Chell had been saying, “Scorching hot. Good for them.”</p><p>Not a significant sample size but encouraging nonetheless, considering a main hang up has been not wanting the crew to hate her for enjoying herself.</p><p>But there’s also the prospect of leading Torres on. Or leading herself on. Their physical attraction to each other is very real. How related is it to how comfortable they are with each other? If physical intimacy gets thrown in, would it illuminate or muddle? Would it build up or break down their current friendship? That friendship means so much to her. Can she really roll the dice on something so important?</p><p>But then again. Torres has proven herself over and over. Even dead drunk, Torres had prioritized Kathryn’s needs.</p><p>If she can’t trust herself to not fuck up what they already have, she’s pretty certain she can trust Torres.</p><p>Except. </p><p>Except maybe this time—maybe Torres is still experiencing the residual effects of her Pon Farr. Maybe this time, she wouldn’t have kissed her if just yesterday she hadn’t been biochemically altered against her will and in fact doesn’t want to do this. </p><p>She’s got to know.</p><p>Edith Piaf, suffocating under the weight of all the other shit stuffed into her box, has got to know.</p><p>“I’ll concede that we can. Still uncertain about should and will. You’re sure this isn’t just about Pon Farr hormones?” Kathryn says. </p><p>“Would that make this easier or harder for you?” </p><p>When she doesn’t know how to answer right away, there’s a flash of anger in Torres’s eyes, and her grip in Kathryn’s hair and on her obliques tightens. Torres says acidly,</p><p>“I suppose you want it to be some alien nonsense that I can’t control. So that you can give in and tell yourself it’s charity work rather than what you want. And then in the morning, you’ll have helped a crew member with a tricky medical condition and can pretend the sex was incidental and you won’t have to think about it again. Is that what you’re banking on, Captain? That any minute now I’ll be throwing shit at you and baring my teeth?”</p><p>“No, B’Elanna. That’s not why I asked.” Although it would be a really good excuse, one she should have thought of herself. It seems dirty to use it now, though.</p><p>“Why did you ask, then?” Kathryn’s hand has been resting on Torres’s neck, and she brings her thumb up to skim her jaw lightly.</p><p>“Just making sure. I mean, if Tom Paris will do in a pinch…” Torres’s look and grip soften. She begins running her fingertips over Kathryn’s side, slips under her shirt and continues the pattern on naked flesh. She says,</p><p>“So this is about insecurities rather than how you can justify it to yourself. I can work with that.” She kisses her very gently and then, “Kathryn. I’ve wanted you at least since I helped steal that Sikarian trajector technology and you dressed me down about it. Kahless, I hadn’t realized until then how much I want you to respect me and like me, let alone how attractive you are. I wanted to get on my knees and make it up to you, prove to you that I could do something right.”</p><p>Oof. That’s a lot. </p><p>Kathryn thinks back to that day, years ago. She’d been a more Starfleet version of herself, rigid and demanding, disappointed because she had already grown to respect and like her so much. But she also remembers her face as she had been being reprimanded, remembers a thrill up her spine when she’d looked at her with such open need to be forgiven.</p><p>Fucking A. What would she have done if Torres had dropped to her knees and suggested such a thing at that juncture? </p><p>“Year One Very Stressed Out but Putting on a Brave Face Me really could’ve benefited from that. She’d never have allowed it, but it would’ve done her a world of good.” Torres laughs.</p><p>“And what about Current You? Could she benefit from that?”</p><p>“What woman couldn’t?”</p><p>“I’m not asking about any other woman.” Her hand is higher under Kathryn’s shirt, knuckles brushing the underside of a breast as she drags her fingernails so softly against her ribs. She leans in and whispers in her ear, “Could it do you a world of good?” Kathryn shivers as the goosebumps rise everywhere.</p><p>“Only one way to find out, I guess.” </p><p>Torres kisses below her ear and then nibbles on her earlobe, her fingernails never ceasing on her ribs. Kathryn moans and pulls at her hip and bucks her own hips up. She wants more firm contact to supplement all the light sweet touches. </p><p>But Torres pulls away suddenly. Not very far away. Just sitting up on her knees, her hands still on her but unmoving now. Her brow’s furrowed as if a thought has just occurred to her and it tastes bad in her mouth. She says,</p><p>“I’d like to know up front what kind of guilt trip you’re going to put yourself on in the morning and what lecture you’re going to give me about duty and how we can’t ever do this again.”</p><p>“Hell and a half, B’Elanna. You’re almost as good at killing a mood as you are at getting me hot and bothered.” Torres raises an eyebrow and tugs gently at her hair, says,</p><p>“I’m serious. I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop for a while, and I’d rather get it out of the way so I can focus on more pleasant things tonight.” </p><p>Kathryn sits up, and Torres takes the hint and removes herself from her lap. They sit side by side now, staring at each other until Kathryn looks away and runs a hand through her hair. She straightens her shoulders and looks back over, straight into her eyes, says,</p><p>“So let me get this straight. You fully intend to go through with this even though you think I’m going to be an uptight jerk about it?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Why? Why subject yourself to that? You deserve better.” Torres laughs.</p><p>“Even if that were true, where exactly am I going to get anything better than even just the one night with you?”</p><p>“I haven’t had enough bloodwine for this conversation.”</p><p>“Nobody’s stopping you.” </p><p>They exchange a hard little sarcastic look, and Kathryn downs the remainder of her discarded drink. It burns down her throat, and then she almost feels the blood of it curdling in her stomach. Awful stuff, that. She melts back into the sofa and puts a hand to her temple, watches as Torres downs a glass and then hunches forward with her elbows on her knees.</p><p>“Should I just go, then?” Torres says, her voice sounding gruff and dejected.</p><p>“No. You need a stern talking to, and then you need to get your clothes off and take me to bed already.” Her head shoots up, and she looks at Kathryn quizzically. “First off, you absolutely deserve the best. You’re an intelligent, skilled, caring, beautiful woman, and even if you don’t believe it, you have intrinsic worth, and I like you and respect you very much. Second, I don’t know what kind of pedestal you’ve got me on, but remove me from it immediately. I’m just a person, no better or worse than anybody else, who sometimes says stupid shit and makes bad decisions and indulges herself. Third, I understand why you would think I might go into some kind of self-loathing denial and pontificate about Starfleet protocol and ideals, and maybe I’m still half-considering it. But I’m leaning toward a ‘no’ on that front, and even if I do, I will not be saying it to you. I will be hurting only myself with it. And then the next time something fucking absurd happens, you can bet I’ll show up at your doorstep for comfort anyway.”</p><p>Torres stares at her and then places a hand on her knee, says,</p><p>“Ok then.” She pauses, looks at her hand on Kathryn’s knee, looks back up. “Thank you for your candor. But. What if I want to show up at your doorstep just because I want to see your face and talk or not talk to you? Do I have to wait for something fucking absurd to happen?”</p><p>“No. But do you really think you’d have to wait long?”</p><p>“Well, no.”</p><p>Kathryn stands. She begins unbuttoning her flannel shirt, says,</p><p>“This is my signal to you that your stern talking to is over, by the way.”</p><p>“Yeah, I got that. I’m just enjoying watching you strip.” Torres laughs. “Stripping out of your conservative lesbian aunt pajamas to the dulcet tones of Linda Ronstadt. It shouldn’t be as hot as it is.” Kathryn laughs. She is, indeed, wearing a version of an outfit she’d seen Aunt Fred wearing on many occasions.</p><p>The song ends and there are a lot of pops and cracks in the silence between tracks to remind her she’s a person. The way Torres is looking at her is reminding her a lot better than a vinyl ever could, though. </p><p>The thudding, funky bass of “You’re No Good” starts up, and she takes a notion.</p><p>Instead of simply taking off her clothes, she’s properly doing a striptease now, swaying her hips in time and slowly unbuttoning, slowly revealing her freckled skin.</p><p>“Fuck. Now you’re doing it on purpose,” Torres whispers, clutching the cushions at either sides of her thighs, watching intently.</p><p>Kathryn shrugs out of her shirt, in rhythm with the music, and then glides her hands down her torso beneath the waistband of her linen shorts and underwear. She wiggles out of them both, hips circling at each thrum of bass line.</p><p>She’s standing there, stark naked and gyrating. She doesn’t know where to put her hands. That Andorian gin time at the Risa strip club had been such a haze of drunken bullshit. So she touches her nipples with her fingertips and throws her head back. That’s a sexy thing to do as a stripper, right?</p><p>“What’s a girl gotta do to get a lap dance in this joint?” Torres says, voice low and ragged. Thank goodness. Kathryn hadn’t known what to do next. But that question had given her ideas.</p><p>She lowers herself into Torres’s lap, says,</p><p>“Keep your hands to yourself, or I’ll alert the bouncer.”</p><p>“Yes, ma’am.”</p><p>Kathryn’s hips grinding down match the rhythm of the cymbal, and she grabs the hem of Torres’s shirt, pulls it up and off. She collapses against her, relishing the feeling of skin against skin. Her mouth latches onto Torres’s neck, licks and sucks and bites. Torres bucks her hips, moans, says,</p><p>“I thought you wanted me to take off my clothes and take you to bed.”</p><p>“That’s not off the table.” Kathryn snakes her hand under the waistband of Torres’s joggers. It’s just the joggers, no panties as an extra barrier.</p><p>Her fingers slide against abundant wetness. She palpates, elated, and Torres quivers beneath her.</p><p>A single finger, slow and deliberate in a firm straight line from opening to engorged clit. A languid circle and then back down. Another languid circle.</p><p>“Kathryn. Let me take my clothes off and take you to bed. Please,” Torres says, ragged and wanton.</p><p>She’s not sure whether it's the Kathryn or the please or the look in her eyes. It’s probably just her own yearning.</p><p>Kathryn stands, turns toward her bedroom. Torres fairly jumps out of her pants and then follows.</p><p>Kathryn had been so confident and in control a second ago. But now with her knees against the edge of her bed and the heat of Torres’s body against her backside. She’s at a loss at how to proceed. </p><p>But there is Torres—hands at her hips, shoving her onto the bed, turning her over, straddling her.</p><p>“Are you planning on finishing what you started, or what?” She leans down for a searing kiss, and Kathryn takes the opportunity to thrust her fingers into her. Torres groans and bucks and sinks her teeth into Kathryn’s trapezius.</p><p>Kathryn shouts her pain and pleasure, thrusts deeper, the heel of her hand connecting with Torres’s clit soundly. She adds another finger, and Torres rides her hand wildly. A fourth finger, and Torres’s teeth grazing against her neck and jaw and collarbone, and then she clenches around her fingers and howls. Almost a coyote sound but not that exactly. </p><p>Kathryn can’t think of a better way to have her fingers broken. She can’t think of a better way to have her ear drums broken.</p><p>Torres is limp and sweaty on top of her, and her fingers and ear drums are intact. No swollen knuckles or tinnitus at all to show for it.</p><p>That’s stupid, though. She’s just fucked Torres, and it had felt so good, so right, so real. She doesn’t need a participation ribbon.</p><p>Torres stirs above her, presses her forehead against Kathryn’s, says,</p><p>“You’d better hold onto something. I’m about to do you a world of good.”</p><p>And she works her way down to settle between Kathryn’s slick thighs.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>